In all of these stories and countless others, you see the same words over and over again: new regulations about x; tougher rules about y; more restrictions about z. Do you know what you never hear? That's right, the exact opposite: ending of regulations, looser rules, fewer restrictions. Legislatures across the democratic world, in an intense desire to show their "legacy" and/or prove how much they "care" pass mammoth behemoth after mammoth behemoth into law, burdening all of our lives with incremental and seemingly irreversible intrusion.

The problem becomes one of equivalency. It's fairly well known that MAID actively wants to villify and criminalize all driving while intoxicated so that in society's eyes [ignore this notion of "society" having human physical characteristics -ed] drunk driving is morally equivalent to breaking and entering.

The problem as I see it is that it seems that everything goes the other way: murdering and raping a small girl is criminal, but then so is failing to properly maintain your company's MSDS datasheets. In our haste to make more and more things less and less acceptible, the opposite has occured. And that can't be good.

So with this notion in my head that there should be some fixed quantity R of regulations (the exact point isn't yet known, though I'm sure we can figure it out given some time and energies -- any psychology grad students looking for a research project?), what can we do? Well, funny you should ask:

I propose a constitutional amendment that would require any legislative body -- be it national, provincial, or municipal -- remove either two related pieces or one unrelated piece of legislation or regulation for every item of legislation or regulation which is brought in.

You can see with a stroke what this could achieve: if you really think that, say, the regulation of midwives is so important than something else must go -- the regulation of the dairy industry, for example. Whenever a government wants to bring in some sweeping piece of legislation setting up a half dozen new government agencies, as what happened after 9/11, in return a half dozen old government agencies need to snuff it. The law is an evolving animal, and it seems silly to believe that evolution requires constant growth [ask a passing T. Rex about this if you question it! -ed], when instead legislation should be a shimmering reorganization, a metamorphosis from 24,364 rules and regulations into 24,364 different rules and regulations.

This isn't to say that laws can't be added with the passing of time: merely understood that this same passing of time must cause old laws no longer necessary to give way. It also means that new laws won't just be some silly legacy-pushing experiment by overly eager politicians with irrational views about their importance on history. Queerbec's proposed new law requiring that Muslims go without a niqab, for example, can only come through if like everybody else those self-same Muslims can write their businesses' signs in English-only. You want to ban money from election campaigns? Then let bars stay open past 2am. We'll see how interested a government is in enacting new legislation requiring dog breeders to comply with onerous new red tape if it means the rule banning sex stores next to elementary schools has to fall by the wayside.

Politicians will have to explain why Amazing New Regulation X is so important that the Amazing New Regulation Y that was only brought forward in 1986 is consigned to the dustbin of history. In time we can find our lives being reduced from the slow chokehold of government controls, and we may in fact learn that if there are only 4,000 things against the law instead of 75,000 that people will find it easier to follow them, and it will be easier to tell when somebody really has done something wrong and not merely run awfoul of something that was fashionable to regulation in 1957.

2010-04-15

The United States Constitution in Article 1, Section 2, Clause 3, classified the black man as 3/5 of a man, requiring five persons to make three voting persons, but at some point in our history, it was changed

So speaketh Andrew Ferguson of Toronto, latest in a long line of left-wingers who apparently wish that blacks were considered 5/5ths of a person.

The charter can be and should be challenged when difficult topics arise and need further discussion.

Not coincidentally, Andrew's change to Canada's laws to prohibit speech he doesn't like would do the same as increasing the 3/5s ratio: making the country less free, not more.

Incidentally, Andrew Ferguson of Toronto, by saying you wanted the 3/5s compromise removed in favour of a 5/5s compromise, you are advocating the return to the black slave trade. Anybody want to tell this guy that his free speech just ended with his little hate speech diatrabe?

2010-04-11

The night of Thursday, April 8th 2010 won't, but should, go down in history as yet another spring storm innovation in Edmonton. We had something that could charitably be referred to as an ice hurricane. The actual snowfall was probably an inch -- maybe two. The Weather Network shows no accumulation on Thursday and only 4mm on Friday. It was awfully hard to record, however. The west side of my house where my patio doors are located had almost a foot of snow drifted tight up against them: drifts that finally disappeared in full on Saturday afternoon. This had something to do with the 90 km/hr winds, perhaps.

Power was out in various places in the province: one of my cousins was without power for roughly 15 hours, as the winds blew down the power lines in their remote corner of the province and affected exactly two houses (ie. not the highest priority for their REA, who was battered from all corners). The TransCanada was shut down, and a friend coming down from Grande Prairie left on a perfectly sunny yet chilly afternoon and at Whitecourt found that the front of the truck was no longer visible through the blowing snow.

While I tried holding on valiently, on Friday morning at about 1am I gave up and turned on my furnace. I was thinking today that it had been off for quite some time. In fact, I ended up whipping up a quick bar graph showing my winter furnace use:A level of "0" means the furnace was never on for the entire month, "0.5" means it was on for half the month or less, and "1" means it was on for the entire month or less (typically pretty damned close to 30 days).

2010-04-10

"Just 24 hours ago, the prime minister was saying he had confidence in this minister, and now 24 hours later -- boom, she's gone," Ignatieff said Friday, about a half-hour after Harper's announcement about Guergis' resignation. "It raises questions about the prime minister's judgment."

How else, other than the title of this post, is one supposed to interpret this bizarre statement? Prime Ministers always always always have complete confidence in their ministers up to the precise millisecond that such confidence evaporates.

It's called not selling out your colleagues without a damned good reason, Michael, and I think every person who dreams of one day becoming a Liberal Member of Parliament with the aim of Prime Minister Ignatieff inviting you to join his cabinet should be extremely frightened about this. Does this mean if you're a hard working Liberal MP, he will ditch confidence in you at the slightest whim? The first unfriendly story in the Toronto Star? [well, in theory...the Toronto Starhas never had an unfriendly story about a Liberal politician since the printing press was invented. -ed]

Either Ignatieff is the most fair-weather friend in the history of the Liberal Party of Canada, or he simply doesn't know the proper public stance Prime Ministers are supposed to have. In any case, its proof that Stephen Harper will still be Prime Minister in 2013, as previously predicted.

2010-04-05

Of course, women marching topless is a big deal, so guys started taking perv-shots like there was no tomorrow. Now the organizer is pissed:

Ty McDowell, who organized the march, said she was "enraged" by the turnout of men attracted to the demonstration. The purpose, she said, was for society to have the same reaction to a woman walking around topless as it does to men without shirts on.

My political reaction is covered in my comment today on RightPundit.com. Below is the bigger reaction: did we want to see these chicks topless in the first place?